Once and Always a New Yorker

David Kurtz, a composer who has won 10 Emmys for the musical scores he has written in Los Angeles during the past 35 years, has just moved back to New York.CreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times

By Pamela Gwyn Kripke

June 24, 2016

I left Manhattan in 1988, the morning after marrying a peripatetic advertising executive whose career would take us to six different cities over the course of 26 years. On the ascent out of LaGuardia, I turned my head to the clouds and cried.

Following stints in the Midwest, the Mid-Atlantic and New England, I eventually arrived in Texas with two babies, two dogs and the aforementioned husband. Last August, after delivering the younger daughter to college and graduating, myself, from the residential restriction in a divorce decree, I returned home. I was just one person, this moving day, one person and a new canine charge, Charles.

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Mr. Kurtz remembered the city fondly from his days as a dark-haired, bearded music student.CreditCourtesy of David Kurtz

Some people flee New York without reservation, while others depart uneasily, but certain that one day, they will make it back. The re-entry is inspired, typically, by the universal tug of home and family, along with the draw of the city’s singular street life, culture and sensibility. The notion of change is inherent in any return, though, since the city will have evolved in your absence and you, too, may be different from who you were when you left.

I knew, in 1988, that I would come back to New York. I was born on York Avenue and East 70th Street and raised in Westchester County, but returned twice after graduate school, living first on Central Park West and later on the Upper East Side. This time, in search of reasonably priced space that would accommodate two college students during vacations and Charles the terrier daily, I landed near where I began, on East End Avenue. I didn’t know that it would take so long to get here, or that so much would happen before I did. But I counted down, the whole time.

Other former New Yorkers have done the same.

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Mr. Kurtz and Candace Bowes celebrated the city by choosing to marry in Central Park in March.CreditAnnette McEvoy

“Moving back was in my head, and my friends will say that I’ve been talking about it forever,” said David Kurtz, 58, a film and television composer who lived in Los Angeles for 35 years. “I am very grateful for L.A., but this was always home, whatever all that means.”

The emotional bond with a place, of course, does not develop simply because you may have emerged from a delivery room within its ZIP code. Native New Yorkers are not the only ones who may feel like expatriates anywhere else.

Mr. Kurtz grew up in Sayville, N.Y., on Long Island, but he formed a connection to Manhattan when he was a child. “My grandmother worked in Columbus Circle at the Diners Club. She loved to take me to Radio City for movies. And my grandfather worked the counter at Katz’s Deli.”

During high school, Mr. Kurtz took the train to Penn Station almost every Saturday for class in the Juilliard School Pre-College Division, and he credits his time there for solidifying his New York City identity. “It was more than a great musical experience,” he said. “It was my literal salvation. I blossomed in this city.”

While at the Manhattan School of Music in 1974, he lived on West 89th Street in the home of Isidore Cohen, then the violinist with the Beaux Arts Trio. “They rehearsed there all the time. Heaven!”

The neighborhood, because of its proximity to Lincoln Center and its “European feeling,” was his first choice when he returned from California a year and a half ago. He had sold his Malibu house and bought an apartment on West 76th Street, off Central Park.

“My L.A. friends say, ‘How are you going to live in that?’ and my New York friends say, ‘How did you find that?’ ”

In March, he and Candace Bowes, a freelance advertising producer who spends weeks at a time working in Los Angeles, were married in the Ladies Pavilion in Central Park, down the street from their new home.

“It was an iconic New York thing to do,” said Mr. Kurtz, who credits a confluence of events for his return, including his children leaving home, aging parents, immediate family who live here and a shift from composing for television programs to writing a screenplay.

Like others who depart New York for places with more serenity and a quieter pace, Mr. Kurtz found he needed to create his own stimulation in California rather than find it in his surroundings. “The ocean, the environment, it became continuous and I lost the fascination,” he said. “Here, I’m in awe every day. I walk out the door, and the city is performance art.”

What a New York re-entry will feel like depends on how long the person has been away and what his life was like at the time he left, said Christine Haney, the executive vice president of global relocation for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “They come here because they have always loved the city,” she said. There is a certain age when people are unafraid to make changes and move anywhere, she added, but after they’ve gone down that path, “they want to come back and just enjoy.”

Once back in town, where they choose to rent or buy an apartment is often determined by how they will now spend their days, in addition to their budgets. “I had a client who said to me, ‘I am ready to go to Lincoln Center. I want to live facing the steps,’ ” said Annie Cion Gruenberger, an associate broker with Warburg Realty. “We went out and bought an apartment facing the steps.”

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Susan Adler Funk and Allen Funk at Playwrights Horizons, right, where they had gone to see “Indian Summer.” A love of theater was among their reasons for a return to New York. The Funks on their 1988 wedding day, in New York.CreditJoVon Photography, Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Susan Adler Funk, 56, loves seeing plays. She has at least six subscriptions to Off and Off Off Broadway theaters and attends between 50 and 60 performances a year. This past September, she and her husband, Allen Funk, 55, rented a two-bedroom on Columbus Avenue and West 96th Street after selling a house in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., where they had lived for three years following 18 years in and around Seattle and six in Washington, D.C.

Also, the couple recently purchased a home in Flemington, N.J., where they intend to grow and sell grapes, “a retirement plan,” Ms. Funk said. “Every book that I own doesn’t have to be in this apartment. I am spoiled that way.” When the grapes are in their infancy, the Funks will spend more time in New Jersey and keep their apartment as a pied-à-terre.

Ms. Funk views herself as a Manhattan expatriate, despite a Rockland County, N.Y., upbringing, attributing that status to the years she lived here during her formative 20s. After college, she rented two apartments, first on Sutton Place and then on West 82nd Street. Following Harvard Business School, where she met Mr. Funk, a Los Angeles native and former newspaper publisher, she rented a walk-up on West 77th Street. Now, as a self-described “fully formed” adult, she has returned to the city and, specifically, to the Upper West Side, for its energy and its closeness to the stage.

“Theater is the reason I’m here,” she said. “I don’t know how the passion began, but I remember going to Playwrights Horizons when I first lived here and was poor and didn’t see much.”

Nostalgia is not part of the re-entry for Ms. Funk, who, while in Seattle, started and ran a think tank focused on diversity issues in the technology industry and now is studying to become an accredited executive coach.

“I actually tried to find where I used to live, but I couldn’t figure it out,” she said.

Sometimes, though, returning to a place where childhoods happened, first jobs were held and mates were met can evoke strong sentiments about the passing of time and life choices. When people haven’t regularly seen the spots where seminal experiences occurred — both good and bad — they can feel walloped, emotionally. Across the street from the hospital where I was born is the hospital where my father died; I have to bolster myself before walking by or choose a different route.

“You have to be part psychologist,” said Ms. Haney of helping people relocate. “You have to be very sympathetic, very understanding of what they’re going through.”

In 1993, after six years of city life, Randy Gilman agreed to leave York Avenue and East 79th Street for Livingston, N.J., when her husband, Zvi Bolimovsky, expressed a desire to raise children outside Manhattan. “From Day 1, when I was pregnant, I was on a countdown to come back once my kids finished high school,” said Ms. Gilman, 63, who was born on Long Island and grew up near Hartford, Conn.

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Randy Gilman and Zvi Bolimovsky were married at the Pierre in 1990. They left the city to raise a family in New Jersey, moving back three years ago.CreditStephanie Diani for The New York Times

After Ms. Gilman’s father died in 1990, her Bronx-born mother, Evelyn, moved to Manhattan, renting an apartment at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, with a park view. Six years ago, when Ms. Gilman’s younger child was 15, the women bought, together, a 5,000-square-foot apartment around the corner, on Park Avenue and East 65th Street, into which the elder Ms. Gilman moved. After Ms. Gilman’s daughter graduated from high school three years ago, Ms. Gilman and Mr. Bolimovsky joined Evelyn Gilman, who is now 91, on the premises.

“My daughter left in August and we moved in by October,” Ms. Gilman said. “I felt like I always belonged here.”

While leaving New Jersey stirred little emotion, sharing space with her mother, who has her own suite, has prompted Ms. Gilman to reminisce.

“I feel sentimental about living with the beautiful art and artifacts that she accumulated on her many trips with my father,” Ms. Gilman said. “Living here also helps remind me about when I was a child and my parents took my sister and me to museums, theater and dance performances.”

When Charles and I landed in New York, there was no party, no ticker tape. The confetti was in my mind, raining down feelings of finish lines, relief, exhilaration, promise. People here ask where I lived before, and when I mention my 17 years in Texas, they seem uniformly horrified. They crinkle up their faces and ask, “Did you like it?” expecting a certain response.

I would have provided that reply, at first. Now, I feel that I should defend the place that I desperately did not like, and that I would want to do this surprises me a little, but makes me feel encouraged about my time there. I tell the people about the efficient air-conditioning and the civility of the children who shake hands when they are in preschool. I tell them that I raised two daughters there, two daughters who speak softly, saying y’all and ma’am and sir. I feel good about the place, standing in Carl Schurz Park on the East River, with Charles on a lead. I do, really, I do.

This realization has played emotional tricks with my return, which, for years, I viewed as a simple construct, an escape from exile. Here, whatever was missing would suddenly exist, and I would feel energized, nurtured and safe. I would feel like me. I must say that this has happened, and in a magnified way — my old friends are more wonderful, the ballet more breathtaking, the brownstone facades more stunning. But is it home? Does it feel like home? I do not know.

Sometimes, the transition is not what people envision it will be.

After 40 years, Howard Bloomberg, 70, chose to return to Manhattan and his family’s Upper West Side neighborhood — not because he was nostalgic necessarily, but for its prewar architecture and residential ambience. “In 1976, I escaped. There was crime, filth, graffiti; on the subway, you couldn’t see out the windows,” said Mr. Bloomberg, a retired investment banker who has lived in London, Boston and, most recently, New Hampshire. “But then, New York became a fabulous city, and it more closely resembled the time when I grew up.”

Mr. Bloomberg and his parents lived at 685 West End Avenue; his grandparents, uncle and aunts lived at 697 West End Avenue. Mr. Bloomberg’s childhood apartment had bedrooms and baths on one side of a hall, and common rooms on the other. He hoped to duplicate that layout.

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In this family portrait, Randy Gilman, right, and Zvi Bolimovsky are joined by their children, Herbert and Adina, and Ms. Gilman’s mother, Evelyn.CreditStephanie Diani for The New York Times

But Mr. Bloomberg is not one to act rashly. He started his hunt in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2010 that he settled on Riverside Drive, across the street from Joan of Arc Park, where he used to play football. The 2,175-square-foot apartment in a 1902 building designed by Ralph S. Townsend overlooks the Hudson, has 11-foot ceilings and the details that Mr. Bloomberg was looking for.

“I am very particular. It took three years to renovate. It didn’t even need a renovation,” he said. It took another two years to sell his house on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, delaying his return to the city until this spring.

Mr. Bloomberg was ready to make the transition, to be less sedentary and more engaged in city life. “Over the decades, I’ve lost touch with just about everybody,” he said before he arrived in early May. “I look forward to having a big dinner party with them in my new apartment. It will be great fun, though we are no longer young men.”

Upon moving in, however, the anticipation turned rapidly to upset. Mr. Bloomberg walked into and out of five supermarkets, unable to navigate the narrow aisles. His phone wouldn’t work. His television and computer wouldn’t turn on. He was dismayed to see litter.

After four days in the city, he thought to himself: “I can no longer cope. I don’t think I can possibly live here again.” Now, some weeks later, Mr. Bloomberg is still here, though still out of sorts. He contemplated selling the apartment and leaving — where to, he was not sure — but the expense of such a turnaround dissuaded him. He did secure a New York City phone number. Adaptation, could it be?

Expectations vary, according to Jeff Feuer, an associate broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate and Mr. Bloomberg’s real estate agent for 10 years. Typically, he said, the adjustment is a lot more difficult if you are leaving New York than if you are returning.

“I have a house in Woodstock, and I love it,” he said, “but even after a couple of days, I just want to come back.”